Scary Prayers... Part 1

Untethered. Unanchored. No landmarks on the horizon.

I did not feel that way until two weeks ago. I thought I was preparing for the unknown, surrendering all plans and submitting all I knew to God and His will. But a call from my husband flipped the script and all of a sudden my heart got exposed. I had no clue how many plans I had been making without even realizing it until the first step in all those plans got ripped right out of my hands. In fact, if you had asked me a couple days beforehand, I probably would have verbalized to you that I was actually more prepared for this result. But the truth is that when it actually happened I felt utterly disoriented. I thought I would be ready to support my husband, to be the strong one when he needed it, but instead I found myself incredibly emotional and struggling to pull it together. I felt remarkably weak and I was not snapping out of it. It just…hurt, and it kept on hurting.

With all the transitions in my life over the past year, I repeatedly had to take it all to God, wrestle and sort through it with Him, and rely on Him for all direction, clarity, and soul-sustaining. But that weekend brought a curve ball, a change of plans I had zero control over. That weekend I walked through the playing out of God’s will for my husband first…and yet I am entirely affected. As much as I can have input, can encourage, and pray, there are parts of my husband’s career ultimately come down to him and God. But my life takes shape based on what plays out. Welcome to marriage. And let me tell you, this weekend was no joke.

We would never have chosen this. We desperately did not want this. We woke up with that sinking feeling of “that was all just a bad dream, right?”. We are living days out we really do not want to be facing. But I am finding my footing again in an unexpected place.

Scary prayers.

In college, a friend told me she had begun praying “scary prayers.” She described them as the prayers you are not quite sure you even want God to answer. You do not know what they are going to cost you. There is a risk involved.

For example, terms like “growing” can be quite the loaded request. Growing probably involves learning. Learning often involves a struggle. Struggles almost always involve pain. So when you pray for growth, are you saying you are willing to go through pain? Or is your prayer a shallow request, full of boundaries and contingencies you may not even be willing to acknowledge?

Her honesty about her desires and yet simultaneous hesitancy has stuck with me ever since that day. No matter what situation I have faced, it has helped me gauge where my heart truly is. It challenges me to ask: What am I willing to pray about this? Or maybe—What can I tell I am avoiding in my prayers?

In my experience, there is no middle ground. You cannot fool yourself when it comes to these type of prayers. When it actually comes time to talk to God and go to those places in my heart, I either shy away from the bold, the risky, the scary prayer, or I actually cross the boundary of safety and verbalize it; I take the leap and say it to Him, knowing full well that I may be opening the door to something part of me does not even want.

Over the last couple months I have not written down my prayers to the extent I usually do. It's almost been too hard to verbalize, to put to words the longings deep in my heart. So lately, I have chosen to just let God handle that exactly as it is. I know He knows what is going on better than I even understand quite yet. So sometimes it has simply been silence. Sometimes it’s been a few tears. Sometimes it’s been playing a song instead of creating my own words.

But I am starting to think God is taking me up on the scary prayers unrecorded but buried deep inside my heart. It is almost as though He is starting to answer them before I was even able to bring them to the surface.

Do not get me wrong. I still feel deep at sea without any clue what shore we are headed towards or how close or far we may be. And at times that is terrifying, unsettling, and a lot like loss when I consider where I thought we were about to land.

But if this sea is God's grace, being completely untethered may in fact be a precious gift. If this means Him bringing us to a place of full reliance on Him, allowing us to know Him more fully, anchoring us to Himself and only Himself... than the only response is thankfulness.

So this Thanksgiving, that is the anchor I chose to cling to, to stop resisting and to finally rest upon... He knows. He is good. He will be faithful.

“...Many people who study the Bible never find God. Many people who go to church never really know him. The only exercise that works 100 percent of the time to draw one close to the real God is risk…

To risk is to willingly place your life in the hand of an unseen God and an unknown future, then to watch him come through. He starts to get real when you live like that.”

–Anything by Jennie Allen, p. 9

#growing #grace #fear #HisWill #thankfulness #pain #prayer